Russell Brand has disclosed that he is giving money to help set up a library in his former school in Grays, Essex. Brand was giving a lecture in London on the importance of reading, where he talked about the books that inspired him and those that are given to him on a regular basis by friends and strangers.

The lecture was the third organised by the Reading Agency, a platform for “leading writers and thinkers to share original challenging ideas about the future of reading in the UK”.

Brand was brought up in Grays, to which he returned recently to find that the public library he used as a child was being relocated as “part of a plan to show that it is not necessary to have a library”. Not only that, the library at his old school had also gone, leaving “barren, empty shelves”.

He said: “It is a disgrace that a state school doesn’t have a library funded by the state.”

Brand said he is helping to pay for a library at the school, now called the Hathaway academy, with publishers including Canongate and Random House donating books. “It’s bloody ridiculous. How can a school get away with not having a library?” he said.

He said the issue preventing more people from reading was the establishment’s “tacit agenda to turn you into a conformist”. He also criticised boring teaching. “A lot of my education, I was being fed it like cough medicine, coshed over the bonce with some boring bit of data I could have done without. When I liked it was when people explained to me what the codes and systems of language were: this is allegory, this is metaphor, this is simile. The dryness was taken out of it. So much information is given to you and you feel the exclusivity – this isn’t for you.”

He also revealed he was regularly approached in the street by strangers who gave him books. “It’s not the same as being given a bar of chocolate. There is a sanctity to it. It means something to them. It’s an indication of what they feel about me.”

During his lecture, he read extracts from books including Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree, which was given to him by his mum or Auntie Pat, and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which came from Damien Hirst.

Sue Wilkinson, chief executive of the Reading Agency, said the lecture was “a platform we designed to stimulate debate and discussion about the transformative power of reading in public and private life”.